We need to stop disinformation in UK political adverts. Here’s a chance to do so

Imagine a world where the packet of sausages you buy at the supermarket is held to a stricter standard of truth than the political leaflets, social media posts, and broadcast adverts that shape the future of your country. That is not a hypothetical. That is the strange, uncomfortable reality of British democracy today. In the wake of Andy Burnham’s sharp remarks about Russian interference in the Brexit referendum, and MI5 chief Ken McCallum’s measured warning against exaggerating Moscow’s impact, a crucial piece of the puzzle has been left out of the conversation. We spend so much time staring at foreign enemies that we have forgotten to look in the mirror. The truly dangerous disinformation, the kind that can decide elections and tip referendums, is often not coming from Moscow at all. It is being produced right here, by our own political parties, campaign groups, and spin doctors, and it is flying completely under the radar because electoral advertising is one of the few areas of British life where you can say almost anything, no matter how false, and get away with it. We have four separate sets of regulations to make sure a sausage advert is accurate, but for the most important advertising of all—advertising that tells us how to vote—there is essentially nothing. No truth commission, no independent watchdog, no legal requirement to correct a lie. That is not just an oversight. It is a structural weakness in our democracy, and it is getting worse with every election cycle.

Let that sink in for a moment. A company selling sausages has to obey rules on labelling, trading standards, advertising standards, and consumer protection law. If a sausage manufacturer claims its product is “pork” when it is actually mechanically recovered chicken, there will be consequences. But if a political party runs an advert claiming that a rival candidate once voted to ban bacon—a completely fabricated story—there is no regulator waiting in the wings. There is no independent body with the power to say “that is false, take it down, correct the record.” The Advertising Standards Authority does not regulate political ads. The Electoral Commission focuses on spending and donations, not truthfulness. The courts are rarely used and deeply impractical for the speed of an election campaign. So the most consequential messages we receive as citizens are also the most unregulated. And in a political era defined by razor-thin margins, this is not a theoretical problem. Brexit was decided by a 51.9% to 48.1% split—a majority of just 3.8 percentage points. Our research into May’s local elections found that 41.4% of wards in England were won by margins of less than 5%, and nine wards were decided by a single vote. Think about that. Nine separate local races were won by one person’s vote. In seats that tight, a single misleading leaflet, a single viral Facebook post, a single deceptive mailer could be the difference between a candidate who represents the community honestly and a candidate who won because of a lie. We found misleading electoral advertising in some of the closest contests in the country, meaning that in all probability, there are local governments today that exist because voters were actively deceived.

The strange thing is that politicians have known about this problem for years, and the solutions are not mysterious. In 2020, a House of Lords select committee on democracy and digital technologies explicitly recommended regulating factual claims in electoral advertising. They saw exactly what we are seeing: a system where truth is optional and lies are cheap. Now, with the representation of the people bill currently passing through Parliament, there is a genuine window of opportunity to act. An amendment covering the same scope as those recommendations has already attracted 37 MPs as sponsors in the Commons, which tells you that there is real appetite for reform on both sides of the aisle. And across the corridor, we are working with peers in the Lords to take it forward. This is not a fringe cause. It is not a radical proposal. It is simply the idea that when someone tells you something false in order to win your vote, you deserve to know that it’s false. The amendment also draws on a voluntary code for honest electoral advertising, which Andy Burnham signed up to in 2024. Burnham is not exactly a fringe figure—he is the Mayor of Greater Manchester, one of the most recognisable politicians in the country, and he understands that you cannot complain about foreign interference while allowing your own side’s disinformation to run unchecked. The voluntary code is modest: it asks parties and candidates to commit to not making false or misleading statements, to correct errors promptly, and to respect the spirit of fair debate. It is not about suppressing free speech. It is about ensuring that the price of admission to political power includes a basic duty not to deceive the public.

We need to be honest with ourselves about why domestic disinformation is so easy to ignore. There is a strange comfort in blaming foreign actors. When we talk about Russian bots and Kremlin trolls, we can pretend that the problem is something alien, something outside our borders, something that we can defeat with stronger cyber security and tougher sanctions. It makes us feel like the victims of a hostile power, not the perpetrators of our own undoing. But the truth is less flattering and more inconvenient. The disinformation that worries us most—the kind that actually changes minds, suppresses turnout, and distorts democratic outcomes—is often homegrown. It is produced by people who speak our language, understand our anxieties, and know exactly which buttons to press. It comes from PR consultants, campaign advisers, and party strategists who have decided that winning the election is more important than being truthful. And when we ignore that, when we focus all our attention on Moscow while our own political parties pump out lies with impunity, we are not protecting democracy. We are hollowing it out from the inside. We are also sending a signal to every future campaigner: the rules do not matter, the truth does not matter, and the only thing that matters is the result on the night. That is a corrosive message, and it explains why trust in politics has collapsed to the point where large swathes of the public simply assume that every politician is lying. We deserve better than that. We are all capable of disagreeing with each other, of voting for different parties, of holding passionate views. But none of us should be expected to navigate a political landscape where the facts can be invented, the record can be rewritten, and no one is held accountable.

This is not to say that foreign interference should be ignored. On the contrary, the head of MI5 confirming that Russia did try to interfere in the Brexit referendum is deeply significant, and we cannot simply wave it away. As Dr Joseph Mullen, a former senior lecturer at the University of Manchester, rightly points out, the vote share of the Leave campaign was 51.9%, against 48.1% for Remain. That is a majority of just 3.8 percentage points. If Russian interference swayed just 2% of voting intentions—and we have no clear sense of exactly how much impact it had—then the much-vaunted Leave majority would evaporate, and Remainers would have emerged as the victors. That is not a wild conspiracy theory; it is a simple arithmetic observation. The margin is small enough that even a modest external intervention could have tipped the balance. Mullen calls on MI5 to carry out a proper impact assessment of Russian interference, using the most up-to-date artificial intelligence tools available, in an attempt to quantify shifts in voting patterns. That seems like a perfectly reasonable request. If we are serious about understanding what happened in 2016, we should be using every tool at our disposal to measure the true scale of the interference. And Mullen is right that such an assessment could go a long way towards building a case for a new referendum. After all, if we now know that the result was distorted by foreign meddling, then the legitimacy of that result is fundamentally compromised. But here is the delicate part: we cannot demand a new referendum because of Russian interference while ignoring our own domestic disinformation. We cannot say “the vote was unfair because foreigners told lies” and then turn a blind eye to the lies told by British campaigners in the same referendum. The public is not stupid. They can see the inconsistency, and they will rightly ask why we are so concerned about foreign lies when we are perfectly comfortable with domestic ones. The fight for electoral integrity has to be universal, or it will fail.

So where does that leave us? At a crossroads, but also at an opportunity. The representation of the people bill is moving through Parliament right now. There is an amendment on the table that would regulate factual claims in electoral advertising, and it has cross-party support. Andy Burnham has signed a voluntary code, proving that real political leaders are willing to commit to honesty. The House of Lords has already recommended reform. The evidence is overwhelming, the solution is simple, and the time is now. We should absolutely tackle foreign interference, and we should support MI5 in its efforts to understand and counter it. But we cannot continue to ignore the disinformation that is being put out by our own political parties and campaigners. Every time we fail to act, every time we say “well, that’s just politics,” every time we shrug off a false leaflet as “part of the game,” we are telling voters that their intelligence is insulted, their concerns are ignored, and their democracy is not worth protecting. That has to change. We need a political culture where honesty is non-negotiable, where a lie told to win a vote is treated as a threat to democracy, and where the people who seek power are held to the same standard of truthfulness as the people who sell sausages. It sounds absurd, but that is the point. We have become so accustomed to political dishonesty that the absurdity is invisible to us. We need to step back, look at how we treat the advertising of breakfast meat versus the advertising of political power, and ask ourselves why we tolerate lies that can change the course of the nation. The answer is that we don’t have to. We can demand better. We can hold every party to account. We can build a democracy where the truth matters again. And if we are truly serious about defending our electoral integrity—from Russia or from ourselves—there is no better place to start.